Big Ideas for Big Data

SAP’s Startup Forum Berlin 2013 featured 32 promising startups presenting their business ideas to a panel of SAP judges. The winning business ideas will be accepted into this year’s SAP Startup Focus Program, a one-year entrepreneur support program offering free SAP HANA software. Ideas ranged from life science robots and semantic video search to 3D foot-mesh for online shoe retailers. The diverse set of participants had one thing in common: To achieve success, they need to process vast amounts of data in real time for their customers. That is where the need for SAP HANA comes in, as it leads to business models that were not possible before:

Enercastprovides a web service that lets energy producers, traders, and grid operatorsforecast the performance of wind and solar power plants. To provide the most detailed projections as possible, the forecasts are based on precise weather data. These complex calculations can consume as much as 70 gigabytes of data per day. Access to SAP HANA technology will increase that data capacity to as much as 120 terabytes, enabling improved algorithm implementation for even greater forecast accuracy.

xCon Partnersdevelop a solution that will reduce shipping costs for online shoe retailersby capturing and matching your personal 3D foot-mesh with the shoe models in the database of the retailer to find the right kind of shoe based on your unique physiology.

RetentionGridhelps businesses segment their customers automatically, and can then provide actionable insights into what repeat customers are buying, including real-time buying-trend alerts. RetentionGrid currently delivers around three gigabytes of data per customer to monitor orders, products, shoppers, and promotional campaigns. Thanks to the high-performance capabilities of HANA RetentionGrid believes the solution will help it keep up with thousands of shops and millions of customers.

Zellkraftwerk,German for “cell power plant,” ishelping to fight cancer by building a life sciences robot, or “cytobot.” By finding precisely the right medical strategy from among hundreds of available therapy combinations, it helps to remove life-threatening tumors. This is achieved with a computer application that compares the patient’s medical history and tumor tissue sample with that of other patients using information from a vast database. It also makes it possible to understand cellular structures, functions, and mechanisms to discover new biomarkers for potential therapies. The data consumption for these activities is enormous. By integrating SAP HANA into the ecosystem of Zellkraftwerk, the cytobot will be able to speed up its cell analysis and increase quality at the same time.